Director Christopher Nolan’s, The Prestige worked it’s magic on the
movie-going audience last weekend to top the North American Box with $14.8
million. Surprisingly enough, The Prestige managed to hold off Clint
Eastwood’s, WWII drama, Flags of our Fathers, which debuted in third
place with $10.8 million. Martin Scorsese scores his biggest hit in recent years
with the The Departed, which is holding strong at second place with $13.6
million for a grand total of $77.0 million to date.

Sony’s animated feature, Open Season places fourth with $8.0 million,
and Flicka, Fox’s family drama, debuts in fifth place bringing in $7.7
million. Tied for fifth place, with Flicka was last week’s box office
winner, The Grudge 2 with $7.7 million.

Falling to seventh place is Universal’s political comedy Man of the Year
with $7 million. Director Sofia Coppola’s, Marie Antoinette opened in
limited release and places eight with $5.3 million.

Rounding out the Top 10 was Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning,
which placed ninth with $3.9 million, and The Marine fell to10th place
with $3.7 million.

Sony’s Running With Scissors opened in limited
release, in only 8 theaters for a strong debut of $225,000, while the 3-D
version of Tim Burton’s, The Nightmare Before Christmas made $3.3 million
in limited release.

To purchase the posters for the above-mentioned movies, just click on the links below:

Eastwood scores another winner with Flags of Our Fathers, solidifying him as one of the great filmmakers of our time. Read on:

Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here. Whenever a film is released that seems so obviously aimed at winning awards, my defenses rise up and my cynicism kicks into overdrive. But the simple fact remains that some “event” films are actually good enough to deserve every last accolade they will inevitably generate.

The undeniable fact remains that Clint Eastwood is one of our greatest living filmmakers, and never has he been so clearly angling for awards as he is with Flags of Our Fathers. Does that mean the movie is not good? Absolutely not. The story behind the six men who raised the flag at the Battle of Iwo Jima, which resulted in the single most famous wartime image in history, is beyond fascinating. Eastwood has gone the extra step to tell this story right by hiring two-time Oscar winner Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby) to co-write the screenplay (with William Broyles Jr.), and the results are largely phenomenal and endlessly fascinating, especially to those who know nothing about the true facts behind this legendary flag event.

The battle scenes–and there are many of them–are some of the bloodiest a studio film has ever released, and I applaud Eastwood and Co. for giving an unflinching look at how dirty, gory, and borderline unmentionable this part of WWII really was. But fighting isn’t what this movie is about. Flags of Our Fathers is about manufacturing heroes during wartime. There is absolutely no doubt that the men in the flag-raising photo are heroes (three of them died on that same battlefield), but as the truth is revealed to us about the circumstances of that event, one can’t help but be reminded of the military repeatedly inventing or exaggerating events during wartime to generate support for causes and wars that may not have been popular at the time. For those who don’t know the details, I’ll let the movie tell the facts. Part of the entertainment value of the film is learned piece by piece the truth. But the rest of the film follows the three surviving soldiers in the photo as they are sent across the country to drum up support for the war and drive war bond sales.

The events these three men attend are often embarrassing and troubling to them, as they are faced time after time with the image of them with that flag. What troubles them the most is that one of the men who died was misidentified in the original photograph, and the family of the real sixth man don’t find out for many years that it was their son in the photo. But more than that, the three men feel more like mascots than soldiers.

February 1945. Even as victory in Europe was finally within reach, the war in the Pacific raged on. One of the most crucial and bloodiest battles of the war was the struggle for the island of Iwo Jima, which culminated with what would become one of the most iconic images in history: five Marines and a Navy corpsman raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi.

The inspiring photo capturing that moment became a symbol of victory to a nation that had grown weary of war and made instant heroes of the six American soldiers at the base of the flag, some of whom would die soon after, never knowing that they had been immortalized. But the surviving flag raisers had no interest in being held up as symbols and did not consider themselves heroes; they wanted only to stay on the front with their brothers in arms who were fighting and dying without fanfare or glory.